July 22, 2010

If you already have a blog, chances are that you are using WordPress as your platform. If you’re not, you should be. There are many reasons as to why WordPress is the most popular blogging platform on the Web today.

In terms of Internet marketing and getting rankings, WordPress offers the most search engine friendly blogging platform in addition to being very user-friendly. The other great thing about it is the number of plugins which you can add to your blog.

If you are not sure what a plugin is, it basically adds new functions to a WordPress blog. A plugin is essentially a program written in the PHP programming language that adds a specific set of features or services to the WordPress blog. All you have to do to add a new feature or service to your blog is find a relevant plugin, upload it to your plugin folder and then “activate” the plugin on the dashboard. It’s that simple.

That being said, there are literally thousands upon thousands of plugins out there (most of them are free) and if you are newbie, you may get tempted to add as many plugins as you can to your blog. The bottom line is that you only need a couple of them to get your blog going. In order to help you with which plugins to choose, I’ve chosen the top 10 WordPress plugins that you must have.

Editorial Note: Most of the plugins mentioned below can be found by searching the WordPress Plugin Directory (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/). The rest can be easily found by doing a Google search.

1. Akismet

Don’t you just hate people leaving spam comments on your blog? I certainly do, and if you dislike such comments appearing on your blog, the Akismet plugin automatically filters them for you. I don’t have time to deal with spam and I hope you don’t either.

2. All-In-One-SEO Pack

If you are looking for the ultimate plugin to transform your blog into an SEO optimized blog, then this is the one. It’s easy to use and before long you can be ranking for your keywords.

3. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

If there’s one thing you don’t want, it’s for the blog to be banned from ping services. When you update or edit your blog, you automatically send a ping to let them know that your blog has been updated and that the changes need to be indexed. However, you can get banned from ping services if you end up doing this too often. In order to avoid this from happening, you need to use the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin.

4. Remote Database Backup

Whatever you do on the Web, you need to have backups. Backing up data is one of those things that people don’t take seriously until a site failure happens to them. This plugin helps you backup your WordPress blog at any time.

5. SEO Smart Links

This cool plugin allows you to automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Furthermore, you can set up your own keywords along with their own matching URLs. A must have if you want the maximum SEO benefit for your blog.

6. Sexy Bookmarks

This allows your readers to submit your articles to numerous bookmarking sites on the Web. A must-have in the era of social media. Get your Sexy Bookmarks plugin today.

7. Frame Buster

This plugin will thwart any attempt to load your site in a frame. Optimal for getting images to rank on the search engines.

8. Google Sitemap Generator

If you want Google to index all the pages on your blog as quickly as possible, then you need this plugin. It allows you to create a sitemap with a click of your mouse.

9. CommentLuv

This plugin allows your visitors to comment while adding a link to their own blog post. This will encourage them to comment and in combination with the Akismet plugin can get you genuine and informative comments on your blog.

10. WP Backlinks

This plugin allows you to track the links going back to your blog. For SEO purposes, you want as many links back to your website as possible, but at the same time, you want them to come from reputable and legitimate sites. The WP Backlinks plugin gives you the ability to control and verify this.

If you go ahead and add the plugins featured on this blog, you can be ready to start dominating the Web with your blog. Keep in mind that it’s the quality and frequency of content that you add to your blog that will determine its success. My hope is that you have found this article about the top 10 wordpress plugins on the Web very useful.

Martin Sejas is a top Internet business consultant in Sydney who helps people achieve their dream of having an online business. Register for a free consultation today. http://www.internet marketingadvice.com.au/

I use WordPress a lot and recommended it to a lot of my clients. When seeting up any WordPress site I always installed the SEO and sitemap plugins, but have now installed most of the plugins mentioned above.

Very informative article. I think you have covered about all essential WP plugins.

The only additions i can probably make to the list is Adsense and Captcha.

Adsense because it offers a secondary income (no matter how small) for little or no effort.

Captcha because Akismet though effective, is often not solely capable of curbing spammers especially with a blog that turns on “do follow” for blog comments. A combination with Captcha becomes very effective.

The default is five. Here’s the math. If you have a weblog that has 1000 articles and you trade 5 links per article of your weblog that would be an additional 5000 incoming backlinks. Your pagerank and traffic would definitely start to rise and any text-link-ads or what ever advertising you are doing if any would also become more valuable

This article is very informative for beginners as well as for pro’s. I have been using most of the plugin’s listed above. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer is what i havnt used till now and would be using now on …. thanks for this wonderful post…

Thank you for the sensible critique. Me & my neighbour were preparing to do some research about that. We got a good book on that matter from our local library and most books where not as influensive as your information. I am very glad to see such information which I was searching for a long time.

As Dele mentioned previously, it’s a great idea to use a CAPTCHA in addition to Akismet. Not only is it a second layer of protection against spam comments, but CAPTCHA can also be used on new account registrations and contact forms to stop bots, whereas Akismet isn’t used in those areas.

Keep in mind, though, that hard-to-read, distorted letters and characters used in most CAPTCHAs are really irritating for your visitors.

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